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J. Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was Deputy Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, where he was heavily involved in budget and trade negotiations. His role in designing the bailout of Mexico during the 1994 peso crisis placed him at the forefront of Latin America’s transformation into a region of open economies, and cemented his stature as a leading voice in economic-policy debates.

If a politician who can figure out how to steer the revolution accordingly emerges, I suspect it will mark the tragic end of most, if not all, of the internet's potential. And speaking as one committed to liberal hopes -- how could the author overlook the potential long-term impact of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that have brought ideas and insight to people all over the world?

MOOCs haven't brought much of anything to the world! Not yet, maybe never. As for the Internet's potential, it isn't the technology's fault, recent "innovations" e.g. Uber, are not realizing the Internet's wonderful potential either.

As a warning, it is the simplest possible perpetual motion concept, and has only been proven to have a tendency towards circular movement. Additionally, I think I have evidence that objects can roll upwards, in a separate experiment.

One question to raise is 'how to stay ahead of the curve now?' There is a genuine possibility that any major new innovation will be beyond any convention of reasoning.

For example, in my own work, I have found evidence of simple perpetual motion machines (see engineering videos at Academic Room or search Youtube for 'master angle' or 'successful over-unity experiment' or search Wikimedia for 'Escher Machine'). Clearly this kind of innovation has been shunned by scientists, according to everyone without the most paranoid imagination.

A thought provoking article by Delong, but I am curious that all our minds as investors are so overwhelmed with the prospects of internet that almost every IPO goes through the roof on expectations, while simultaneously our minds continue to ignore the fact that we are creating virtually far lower pool of consumers in the long term going by the purchasing power; this is the greatest remiss of our times.

It IS an oddly short-sighted way of thinking! Investors ignore the fact that the tech companies in which they invest, if successful, will decrease consumer purchasing power.

The same is true for data-mining in order to devise more granular targeted advertising. Ultimately, it will be useless if the potential customers, the current lower and middle classes, have too little wealth or insufficient income to make purchases. I'm not certain that most households will benefit from the ICT revolution for much longer, not while their marketable skills continue to lose value.